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Roan to get over himself? Tell him. He won’t be happy, but he’s not an idiot. Spell out your terms, and if he can’t live with them, leave.”
     
    Dylan made a noise of disbelief and put his mug down heavily on the coffee table. “Oh yeah, he could only be dead in a month. I should walk out on him.”
     
    “Oh please. He’s been dying since you met him. If you stay with him out of pity, he will resent the shit out of you. If you don’t like things, do something about it, or just sit down, shut up, and live with it.” He headed for the door, hoping he wasn’t storming out like a big drama queen, but… yeah, there was probably no avoiding that. Still, he had to leave because he was so angry he was sure he’d say something they’d both regret.
     
    Dylan said something, but Holden just ignored him. He hadn’t even told Dylan he knew the name Carey Switzer. In fact, he knew Switzer very well.
     
    And he could easily imagine him being a killer.
     

5
Psychosomatic
     

     
    It was day three when Dylan decided the Way of Water was just not going to work for him this week.
     
    It was something to strive for. It was the essence of Taoism basically: to be fluid, essential, give without taking, to be strong without being violent, to be calm and placid.
     
    Yeah. Not this month.
     
    Not that he didn’t want to be. Without Roan here, and with Doctor Rosenberg only letting him stay long enough to see Roan was fine before shooing him out of the hospital, he’d spent a lot of time at the Buddhist temple, working on his meditation techniques. But then he’d get frustrated, his mind wandering all over the place, so he’d come home and paint; but he found himself not wanting to paint, so he’d fill in for someone at work and find himself too exhausted and distracted to deal with customers. It was a vicious cycle that continued without ceasing. He even slept badly, so he was always tired.
     
    He’d come to the conclusion that living in Roan’s house without Roan here made him feel like a trespasser, or worse, a living ghost, haunting someone else’s house. What would he do without Roan exactly? What if he never came back?
     
    His mind just shied away from it. He couldn’t think it. It seemed impossible that Roan, probably the largest of the larger-than-life figures he’d ever met, could simply die, disappear, go away. He seemed almost mythical now. Or if he did die, it would be doing something big and splashy, something heroic and needlessly violent. He wasn’t the type to die in his sleep.
     
    So when Doctor Rosenberg called him on day three, his heart lurched, but she said quickly, in her smoke-husky voice, that nothing was wrong with Roan; she just needed Dylan to come down to her office as soon as he could. That happened to be the moment he’d given up on the Way of Water (fuck his laundry; he could do that any time), and he raced there in the rain, finding all the traffic lights working against him as he tried to figure out why she’d want to see him. Was she lying about nothing being wrong? She must have been. She just didn’t want him to freak out. So he tried very hard not to freak out in traffic, and when he parked his car, he made sure no one was around before screaming at the top of his lungs. Sometimes it was cleansing to let out the pain and fear, but today all it did was make his throat hurt.
     
    Dylan was shaking a little when he finally got up to Doctor Rosenberg’s office at the university hospital, but she thought he was just soaked from the rain and chided him in a motherly fashion for not wearing a warmer coat. Her office smelled faintly of cigarettes, although there were no ashtrays in evidence. There was a small explosion of paper covering her desk, little drifts of mail, a flat-screen computer, and a complicated-looking phone. Her carpet was dark green, her walls an off gold like old ivory, and along with framed degrees was what looked like a picture of a fractal in a metal frame